On Madness
by Pernshinigami
Summary: Maka's musings during her senior year at Shibusen on the role our society plays in allowing Madness to take hold.


On Madness as a Symptom

An Essay by Maka Albarn

Madness, the darkness every person dreads to face, the darkness and evil inside. And Kisshins, the demons who fell from the path of the human. Many generations have speculated on the origins of evil, and whether people are innately good or if some are just born evil. The idea that someone is born evil and that evil is in all of us frightens many people. It hits something disturbing inside us.

This essay is an attempt to drop another two cents into the bucket of the origins of evil, and on why people do evil things. It may come off to some as preaching. To others as sour and sarcastic, to others as brutal and still more as the cries of Chicken Little, or a coyote howling her anguish to the moon. But self examination is necessary to maintaining one's soul.

Why is it some people would rather leave the human path than face the sun? I believe the foothold madness has taken is because of the way our culture thinks. We are embroiled in the myth of control. Indoctrinated to believe that we can master nature, and force it to our will. This culture of control creates a culture of pain, and a culture of things that relieve it. Our children grow up in a world where they're told if they can buy this lipstick they'll be loved, if they can buy this new toy they'll be popular and by extension never be lonely. That if other people feel envy, they will stay near you to bask in your glow and that such a thing is "Connection."

You create people like Medusa, who believe they are exempt from the rules, and believe they can exert control over their environment and other people and who only know how to relate to their world by controlling what they can, and destroying what they can't control. People with a Medusa mindset believe that if they can exert enough cruelty, Nature and the Human Spirit will bend to their will.

You also create people like Asura, who is in every way symptomatic of the problems of consumerism as a means of control. People who take the Asura route from the human path believe that this consumption of dead things no matter how much or how depraved will stop the pain caused by the Medusas of the world. Stop the pain by consuming others and causing them pain.

The problem with this fundamental method of stopping pain is that it focuses on numbing the symptoms rather than healing the wounds. If you numb the pain of a cut to the femoral artery, you are still going to bleed to death, the only difference is you don't feel pain as you die. A true doctor doesn't give a cold pill to someone with HIV. A true doctor treats the HIV.

Madness gains its foothold from a disconnect between humans, the land, and each other. To understand this paralell, look at our modern system of growing food.

Agriculture in the modern era doesn't begin with a farmer and a plow, it begins with an oil well or a natural gas well. These wells extract the essence of dead and decomposed creatures that lived millions of years ago. A plastic toy? Its made of dead dinosaurs. I could be holding a tyrannosaurus rex when I hold a water bottle or hitting a pterodactyl when I type at a keyboard. Even the metals we bend with a blacksmith's forge, the gold in a wedding ring, the aluminum in a soda can, come from dead stars.

All of modern industry and agriculture is built on death. But we don't think that an animal died when we look at a plastic bottle. We think its an inanimate object, not that its the corpse of a brontosaurus or a gorgonopsid. Its the same way with many city children who don't know that hamburger comes from cows.

Yet to get that hamburger, we start with dead organisms, plants animals and microbes. We pump these out of the ground, and we spray the soil with them. Up comes the wheat, and the corn, and the potatoes for the french fries. And we think that the unusual size of the amber waves of grain is a sign of their prosperity.

The grain is harvested, and much of it is turned into bread. But 10 pounds of it is fed to a cow. The cow then gains a pound for those ten pounds of grain. We kill the cow, and we remove its skin. We remove most of its bones. We remove its organs. We cut its meat into pieces and send them to a butcher shop. No, we send them to a big box store or a grocery, grind them to pieces we can't recognize as an animal, mold it into a patty and fry it over a flame.

In order to make a hamburger, we have disconnected ourselves from a cow. Most children don't know how to deal with the idea that a cow died to make the meal on their plate. Even though we say grace to thank the cow for dying. It doesn't change that we're killing something to live.

What did change, is that our ancestors were intimately involved in this cycle of killing to live. They killed the animals they ate. Or they went without meat. Our ancestors knew what animal their food came from. Someone could feed us pork and say its an iguana, and we wouldn't know it wasn't an iguana on our plate because we do not hunt our own protein anymore. Our vegetables seem to our children to come out of thin air. They do not, they come out of earth, of wind, and of sun. We disconnect ourselves from this cycle of life and death and from the earth.

And the result is that we are in pain. Most humans are not raised in a culture of the soul, most humans are raised in a culture of things and consumption. Our militaries kill people with a button push or a trigger pull to distance themselves from the pain of that killing. But by disconnecting ourselves from the natural process, we create a hunger for it.

But our society tells us, "no, you don't hunger for connection or comfort, you hunger for things." And it turns people into simply another thing. The way our culture of control, with a few at the top trampling everything below them under foot, operates, it keeps those people beneath them from rising up by making them believe that they, and every other person on the ground next to them are all things. We are taught we can treat other people like we treat cows, and that this is okay. Humans are things. There are billions of them, humans are not precious they are as common as mud. Or that is what we are taught to believe in industrialized society. The difference between a person and a sheep is that a person can express their pain, and this expression helps them to feel better. A sheep can only scream in agony as its ripped to pieces by a pack of wolves.

By saying its okay to numb yourself by consumption and dehumanization of yourself and those around you, we open the door for more and more humans to fall from the path. Because we tell people that violence and control are a more acceptable way to deal with our pain than to feel it and work through it.

And you get someone like Chrona, who doesn't know how to deal with the world other than by killing people. They want another way, they want a path of harmony rather than a path of disconnection and dehumanization. But the Medusas of the world have convinced them that there is no other path than that of numbing your pain by inflicting it. No way to live, other than to eat.

But the Chronas of the world can recover. If you show them that there are actually two paths one can take, not a single unavoidable destiny forced upon you, then people respond by taking the more fulfilling path.

The answer lies in building connections. Humans were not meant to be disconnected. Perhaps that's why the path of the weapon and meister is so appealing. Souls resonate because they were meant to connect with each other. It is said, that a long time ago Zeus created man with four arms, four legs, two heads and two souls. But he found this design flawed, and so he separated each person into a single soul, a single pair of arms and legs, a single head. But this lead to an emptiness. To this day, every person in the world searches for the other half of themselves.

We cannot separate madness from the human condition, but by building connections to the rest of the world, we can lessen its impact upon humanity. By acknowledging that all things on earth kill to live, we acknowledge that we are part of the world. By integrating our system of agriculture into our understanding of the cycle, we become a part of it.

Do not suppress pain or emotion, acknowledge they are there. Acknowledge that which makes you human. Acknowledge your pain. Seize it by the throat. Confront it. Then decide what to do about it. The best ways of dealing with pain involve creation and communion. We need to learn to confront our pain through positive means. Only then, can madness be turned into brilliance and pain into beauty.

The truth of the matter is something every Shinigami instinctively knows regardless of age or time period. We are ONE. And when we live in a state of being one with the cycle of life and death, we will heal our wounds, rather than simply numbing our pain.


End file.
